Hailing from Biratnagar, Nepal, Sushant Thapa holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Kolkata, 2021). He has been published in places like The Gorkha Times, The Kathmandu Post, and several international magazines. He has also been published in national and International anthologies. One of his poems is included in the Paragon English book for Grade 6 students in Nepal. He teaches Business English to Bachelor’s level students of BBA and BIT at Nepal Business College, Biratnagar, Nepal. Recently he recited his poem “The Poetic Burden” in Kalinga Literary Festival, Kathmandu, Nepal. He was recently awarded with Indology Best Poet Award 2022 from West Bengal, India for his debut poetry book “The Poetic Burden and Other Poems.”

Labor of Muscle and Mind

In an utter silence

An idea creeps and

It becomes so loud

That even deaf ears

Of the one in its spell

Can hear it.

A formed conception is a mind,

It needs attention to inner growth.

Do you feel the soul’s meditation?

A flowering subjectivity 

Knows how quiet its listener is

And it converses in liberation and

Becomes voices of many.

In the scorching sun

The breeze knows

Where the hot sweat burns without

Any judgments

And only labor speaks

About the unpainted dreams.

In your wheelbarrow

Have you carried the world?

That silently carries your ideal 

Or just a new laboring hour?

A design is you

One more stone of thought that matches

Makes you fall in love

And blink an eye

For the world.

________________

The post Labor of Muscle and Mind – A Poem from Nepal first appeared on Sindh Courier.

A poet from Biratnagar, Nepal holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Kolkata, 2021). He has been published in places like The Gorkha Times, The Kathmandu Post, and several international magazines. He has also been published in national and International anthologies. One of his poems is included in the Paragon English book for Grade 6 students in Nepal. He teaches Business English to Bachelor’s level students of BBA and BIT at Nepal Business College, Biratnagar, Nepal. Recently he recited his poem “The Poetic Burden” in Kalinga Literary Festival, Kathmandu, Nepal. He was recently awarded with Indology Best Poet Award 2022 from West Bengal, India for his debut poetry book “The Poetic Burden and Other Poems.”

Change and Me

I saw the seasons change

I remained the same.

The agony-kissed sands

Has built a faithful castle.

Time asked me an answer

To my disobedience.

The piper led

The muse of my art astray.    

I have walked

On the sun-kissed flowery bed.

Also, I have been amazed with

My broken mirror self

Surprised in the reflection.

The leaping flames

Burn my meanings

Yet I am as simple as a drop of dew

In the face of the maple leaf.

I ask the piper

The way to the horizon

That completes me.

_______________

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A poet from Biratnagar, Nepal holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Kolkata, 2021). He has been published in places like The Gorkha Times, The Kathmandu Post, and several international magazines. He has also been published in national and International anthologies. One of his poems is included in the Paragon English book for Grade 6 students in Nepal. He teaches Business English to Bachelor’s level students of BBA and BIT at Nepal Business College, Biratnagar, Nepal. Recently he recited his poem “The Poetic Burden” in Kalinga Literary Festival, Kathmandu, Nepal. He was recently awarded with Indology Best Poet Award 2022 from West Bengal, India for his debut poetry book “The Poetic Burden and Other Poems.”

Flowering Love

I am free

Like the blowing breeze. 

I can be a touch

That gives you memories.

Love comes once

And you can build a castle to retire. 

We will be old together

Wrinkles on our youth

Will not crumple our love. 

The alphabets of your name

That I call

My bare mind can still recall.

A worldly game of existence

Is a true test

Life is a complete poem

Different for readers

Who have lived like words

In chain and togetherness. 

Words are never alone

They are my lovely companions

Like your senses

Where I am the flowering fragrance.

_________________

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Vanita Srivastava

Authorities are evacuating thousands of people from their homes in Joshimath, a small settlement in Uttarakhand, India, after more than 600 houses developed cracks due to unprecedented rapid subsidence.

The Chamoli district administration has marked houses at risk with red crosses and is shifting people to temporary accommodation outside the hazardous area.

A team of scientists from the CSIR-National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) is assessing the situation in Joshimath, a popular town for tourists, which has a permanent population of over 16,000. The scientists are expected to report on the cause of subsidence next week.

Experts say uncontrolled infrastructure building, construction at a nearby hydroelectric station, a poor drainage system and burgeoning population in the hill town are putting pressure on its fragile landscape.

The Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has a long history of natural hazards, mainly attributed to changes in weather patterns, abnormal rainfall and human activities. At about 6,200 feet above sea level, Joshimath is considered a gateway to Himalayan mountain climbing expeditions and Hindu pilgrim centers. The city sits on ancient landslide deposits of sand and stone, not rock, which makes the region extremely vulnerable.

Early warnings

Warnings about subsidence came as early as 1978, when a municipal panel recommended banning major construction work in the area and observed that since the city rests on sand and stone deposits from old landslides, it was slowly “sinking”.

Mass sinking associated with soil creep and debris displacement were responsible for landslide in the Sunil area of Joshimath hill complex, according to another 1982 study1. It noted that boulders embedded in loose sandy soil were being displaced due to seepage of spring waters. This has led to local sinking.

In 2010, researchers from Garhwal University and Disaster Mitigation Management Centre also cautioned of an imminent ecological threat. “Joshimath has been showing signs of distress due to the burgeoning anthropogenic pressure,” they wrote in the journal Current Science.

Population boom, poor drainage

Geologists maintain that the present crisis unfolded because of poor planning and the failure of authorities to take notice of these repeated warnings.

“It is an utter failure of governments,” Yaspal Sundriyal, a former head of the geology department at Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University, told Nature India. Many scientists have warned of this impending danger but none of the ruling governments over the years have taken action, he said.

The ecological crisis in Joshimath has been triggered by human activities. “The population has increased manifold and so have infrastructure projects. The buildings are not designed taking into account the fragility of the landscape,” he said.

Sundriyal said there was no system to manage wastewater, which was pushing down lose material into the ground, resulting in the sinking.

Sushil Khandauri, a geologist at the Uttarakhand State Disaster Management Authority said some building had developed very small cracks after flash floods in Uttarakhand towards the end of 2021. “Unscientific construction and poor drainage triggered the recent subsidence,” Khandauri told Nature India.

Tunnels for a nearby hydropower project are made through blasts, which shakes up the debris above the rocks, leading to cracks in houses. “The project is hazardous for the local environment and has wreaked havoc on the area’s ecology,” said Anjal Prakash, research director and Adjunct Associate Professor at Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

“Tunnel construction activity has impacted water regimes”, Prakash, a coordinating lead author for the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC), told Nature India. Two of these special reports published in 2019 and 2022 pointed out that this Himalayan region was a climate hotspot. “Joshimath is an example of what we should not do in the Himalayas,” Prakash said.

____________________

Courtesy: Nature (Published on Jan 11, 2023)

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By Archana Chaudhary and Aaron Clark

Every year, as the weather warms, teams of Indian scientists trek the Himalayan Mountains to study the Chhota Shigri glacier in India’s northern state of Himachal Pradesh. For the past decade and a half, they’ve recorded the extent of snow cover, checked the temperature of the air and soil, observed the surface of ice formations and measured the discharge from seasonal snowmelt that feeds the river valleys below.

This year, record-breaking glacial melt washed the discharge measuring station clean away.

“We had installed it in June and by August we couldn’t even find the remnants,” said Mohammad Farooq Azam, a glaciologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore. “We had an intense heat wave in early summer when temperatures in March and April broke 100-year records. And we have had resulting glacial melt. Our team was on a glacier last week and we have seen record-breaking melt in the Himalayas.”

Unprecedented heat waves that swept the planet this summer are melting snow and ice not just in Europe’s Alps but in the iconic Himalayan range, where the mountains shelter the largest reserve of frozen freshwater outside the North and South poles. Global warming is accelerating the loss of Himalayan glaciers much faster than scientists previously thought, destabilizing a fragile system that’s helped regulate the earth’s atmosphere and key water cycles for millennia.

The impact is most acute in Pakistan, where floods have submerged farmland and cities, affecting more than 30 million people and killing upward of 1,000 since June.

There, glacial melt has added to severe monsoon rainfall driven by a warming Arabian Sea and the weather-warping effects of La Nina, creating what Pakistani officials have called a “climate catastrophe.” That deluge is just the beginning, however.

Hard to comprehend the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan, the 5th most populated nation in the world.

Nearly 1400 dead, 1 million houses damaged or destroyed, and 50,000,000 people displaced.

1/3 of the country is underwater.pic.twitter.com/NFd15q3g7I

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) August 30, 2022

Extreme floods often lead to extreme drought. The Indus River basin, which begins in Tibet and flows through Pakistan before emptying into the Arabian Sea near Karachi, is twice the size of France and generates 90% of Pakistan’s food. When the basin floods, much of the water flows to the ocean rather than seeping into the soil, paradoxically causing water scarcity. A World Bank study estimates that by 2050, 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion people in South Asia could be vulnerable to dwindling water supplies.

The consequences are poised to reverberate through the global economy long after the flood waters in Pakistan recede, adding to a litany of harvests from Brazil to France ruined by extreme weather this year.  But disruption to a major cryosphere is also contributing to shifting global weather patterns that are warming oceans, raising sea levels and intensifying droughts, even in China.

The Himalaya, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges contain almost 55,000 glaciers that feed river systems on which more than 1.3 billion people rely. More than 7,000 of those are in Pakistan itself, where melting ice and snow has formed thousands of high-altitude lakes prone to overflowing.

“Science is very clear about the interconnectedness of the ocean and the active water cycle. Why are these two systems important? Because they regulate the earth’s atmosphere,” said Anjal Prakash, a research director and professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “The system that regulates the earth’s climate needs to be protected.”

India’s record-smashing heatwave, Pakistan’s floods and accelerating glacial melt in the “rooftop of the world” could shift the tenor of climate negotiations at COP27, which is taking place in November in Egypt. There, global warming is having adverse effects on the Nile, and making life harder for farmers in its increasingly salty delta.

Developing nations, responsible for a fraction of historical greenhouse gas emissions, will push their case for more funds from industrialized countries that have prospered for more than a century at the expense of the planet. The cash is meant to both compensate poorer nations for the adverse effects and help them adapt.

Pakistan is a glaring example. It’s classified as the world’s eighth most vulnerable country to climate change, but contributes 1% to global emissions of planet-warming gases, according to Mohsin Hafeez, Pakistan’s representative at the International Water Management Institute.

“Pakistan will need to be more vigilant and take more measures to build capacities to deal with climate change,’’ Hafeez said.  “But Pakistan cannot manage things on its own.”

Floods and droughts have affected human civilizations since ancient times, but they’re increasing in frequency and intensity as the planet warms.

When the earth heats up, more water evaporates and is captured in the atmosphere, creating drought and, when it finally rains, a torrent. In Pakistan, which already gets annual monsoon downpours, it means severe flooding will become more frequent. The period from January to July 2022 was the sixth-warmest start to a calendar year for the globe in records going back 143 years, according to the US National Centers for Environmental Information.

The crisis is already prompting calls for lenders to forgive Pakistan’s debt to help it cope.  Even before the flood, the country was grappling with financial and political turmoil. It secured a $1.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund this week to avert an imminent default.

The flood damage, however, is worth upwards of $10 billion, according to (Former) Finance Minister Miftah Ismail, equivalent to nearly 3% of the country’s gross domestic product last year. Swirling waters have set back the economy, affecting millions of acres of farmland, including about 40% of the country’s prized cotton crop in the worst-hit province of Sindh, according to Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal.

In less developed nations like Pakistan, where large populations and widespread poverty stretch government resources, there’s also been chronic underinvestment in flood defenses and the aging dams and canals built to irrigate drier areas. The lack of investment means the Tarbela and Mangla reservoirs on either side of Islamabad have become so choked with silt sweeping down from the mountains that they’re less able to contain floodwaters and prevent inundation further downstream.

Pakistan may get aid to help shelter those displaced, but its financial problems mean there likely won’t be much left to invest in that infrastructure.

As Chair of the Group of 77, a coalition of 134 developing countries, Pakistan, along with India and others, should make a case for loss and damages from these extreme weather events at COP27, according to Fahad Saeed, an Islamabad-based climate scientist with Climate Analytics.

“The floods this year are a wakeup call for everyone,’’ said Saeed. “This is the effect that a 1.1 degree Celsius rise has brought upon us. The result is climate events that are beyond tolerable levels of low and medium income nations.’’

The climate clock is ticking even on the tallest peaks. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal predicts the Himalayas could lose 64% of their ice by 2100 — within a human lifetime — reshaping the face of mountains that have inspired human endeavor.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya region, which stretches from Afghanistan to northern Myanmar, is home to iconic peaks, including Mount Everest and K2, which have attracted generations of explorers and climbers. Even that’s changing.

Snow and ice is crashing through mountain villages, leveling hotels and this summer prompted officials in Nepal to say they planned to move the base camp for Mount Everest expeditions off the rapidly thinning Khumbu glacier as crevasses increasingly appear in the area where climbers sleep. They told the BBC they’d move the site to a lower altitude where there’s no year-round ice.

“The heat waves this year and the massive floods in Pakistan are a warning,” said Azam, the Indian glaciologist. “This is the point at which we human beings simply have to turn back.’’

_____________________

Courtesy: Bloomberg (Published on September 1, 2022)

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Sushant Thapa

Sushant Thapa is a poet from Biratnagar, Nepal who holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Kolkata, 2021). Sushant has been published in several national and international newspapers and magazines. His work has also appeared in national and International anthologies. One of his poems is included in the Paragon English book for Grade 6 students in Nepal. He teaches Business English to students of BBA and BIT at Nepal Business College, Biratnagar, Nepal.

The Making

A stone statue

Takes a lot to carve

It has its heart,

In the city full of dreams

That wakes in unfinished chapters.

Hope is the name of a flower

Even blooming in adversity.

The name keepers

Have their foundations

Inked with glory.

The history of commoners 

Is a fresh draft

Which the time has to publish.

The prayers for clouds to rain

Need no intention of floods. 

The earth needs its roots,

To bear the fruits of care.

In every nooks and alleys

In every walls painted in red

The lives of the city dwellers,

Find their stories,

Published by walls: the publishers of the poor.

__________________

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BY VAISHNAVI CHANDRASHEKHAR

Spring came early this year in the high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, a remote border region of Pakistan. Record temperatures in March and April hastened melting of the Shisper Glacier, creating a lake that swelled and, on May 7, burst through an ice dam. A torrent of water and debris flooded the valley below, damaging fields and houses, wrecking two power plants, and washing away parts of the main highway and a bridge connecting Pakistan and China.

Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, tweeted videos of the destruction and highlighted the vulnerability of a region with the largest number of glaciers outside the Earth’s poles. Why were these glaciers losing mass so quickly? Rehman put it succinctly. “High global temperatures,” she said.

Just over a decade ago, relatively little was known about glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, the vast ice mountains that run across Central and South Asia, from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east. But a step-up in research in the past 10 years — spurred in part by an embarrassing error in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which predicted that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 — has led to enormous strides in understanding.

Scientists now have data on almost every glacier in high mountain Asia. They know “how these glaciers have changed not only in area but in mass during the last 20 years,” says Tobias Bolch, a glaciologist with the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He adds, “We also know much more about the processes which govern glacial melt. This information will give policymakers some instruments to really plan for the future.”

That future is daunting. New research suggests that the area of Himalayan glaciers has shrunk by 40 percent since the Little Ice Age maximum between 400-700 years ago, and that in the past few decades ice melt has accelerated faster than in other mountainous parts of the world. Retreat seems to have also recently initiated in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, one of the few areas where glaciers had been stable. Depending on the level of global warming, studies project that at least another third, and as much as two-thirds, of the region’s glaciers could vanish by the end of the century. Correspondingly, melt-water is expected to increase until around the 2050s and then begin to decline.

These changes could have far-reaching consequences for hazard risk and food and water security in a heavily populated region. More than a billion people depend on the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems, which are fed by snow and glacial melt from the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, known as the world’s “Third Pole” because it contains so much ice. Peaking in summer, melt-water can be a lifesaver at a time when other water sources are much diminished.

But increased melt may also trigger landslides or glacial lake outburst floods, known as GLOFs, scientists warn. Or it could aggravate the impact of extreme rainfall, like the deluge that caused recent massive flooding in Pakistan. Changes in melt could also affect the safety and productivity of the region’s expanding hydropower industry. Countries like Nepal already get most of their electricity from hydropower; others, like India, are planning to increase capacity of this low-carbon energy source. Around 650 hydro projects are planned or underway in high-altitude locations across the region, many of them close to glaciers or glacial lakes.

Unpredictable changes in the timing of snowmelt, which supplies water for irrigation, have led some farmers to abandon their fields.

The Indus basin, which largely falls in Pakistan and northwest India, is particularly vulnerable to long-term changes in runoff, scientists say. That’s because snow and ice melt comprise as much as 72 percent of river runoff in the upper Indus, compared with between 20 and 25 percent in the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers (the latter two depend on monsoon rain).

Farmers in Gilgit-Baltistan are already affected, according to Aisha Khan, CEO of the Mountain and Glacier Protection Organization in Islamabad, who has been visiting the region regularly for two decades. In one village, Khan says, unpredictable changes in the timing of snowmelt, which supplies water for irrigation, have led local men to abandon their fields and migrate to cities. In another settlement, increased velocity and volume of river flow have eroded banks and swept away land. “These communities can’t afford to invest in flood and erosion protections,” she says.

***

Atmospheric warming is the main driver of glacier melt in the Hindu Kush Himalayas—temperatures here, as at the poles, are rising faster than the global average. But local topography and other factors may also be shaping the pace of retreat, scientists say.

The region’s glaciers are scattered across thousands of kilometers and vary greatly in size, thickness, and elevation. Some are melting faster than others. A 2020 study projected that the eastern end of the range, in Nepal and Bhutan, could lose as much as 60 percent of its ice mass by 2100, relative to 2015, even in a low-emissions scenario. By comparison, the western end, including the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges in Pakistan, would see slower melt rates.

These melt patterns may have to do with regional climatic differences, says Sher Muhammad, a remote sensing specialist with Nepal’s International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental institute at the forefront of climate research in the region. The eastern Himalayas are strongly influenced by the Asian summer monsoon and get more rainfall than snowfall, he notes. On the other hand, the western Himalayas, as well as the Hindu Kush and Karakoram, are more influenced by what are known as the western disturbances, which bring more snowfall. Glaciers in the west are also larger, Muhammad says, and respond more slowly to climatic changes.

But they do, eventually, respond. For decades, most glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains bucked the global trend: the majority were stable, and some even grew. One reason for the anomaly was thought to be the relatively stable snowfall in the area, compared with declines in other parts of the Himalayas. But a study published in Nature last year found that overall acceleration of ice loss in the late 2010s had shifted even this area from “sustained thickening” to a “generalized thinning.” While this trend needs more research, the remote sensing data used in the study is of high-quality, notes Muhammad, who was not involved with the research paper. “Climate change may be ending the Karakoram anomaly,” he says.

Some studies suggest that glaciers covered by debris such as rocks and pebbles, which protects the glacial surface from the sun’s radiation, may melt more slowly. “The blanket protects the ice,” says Mohammed Farooq Azam, a glaciologist with the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.

One study projects almost a threefold rise in the risk of lake outbursts in the Himalayas, posing a hazard to villages, roads, and dams.

Meanwhile, glaciers that terminate in a lake may melt faster, as warm water is directly in touch with the glacier’s toe, or snout. Remote sensing data show that glacial lakes have increased in number and size since the 1990s. Lake formation is an outcome of glacier melt, explains Azam. After the last ice age ended, glaciers retreated, leaving behind depressions that have only recently begun to fill with ice melt.

More glacial lakes means greater risk of glacial lake outburst floods, when land or ice holding back a lake can suddenly give way, releasing a huge volume of water. One study projects almost a threefold rise in the risk of lake outbursts in the region, posing a hazard to mountain villages, roads, and hydropower dams.

The risk of lakes bursting may be increased when glaciers “surge.” In this phenomenon, ice in the upper parts of the glacier slips or moves downward, causing the snout of the glacier to advance. A recent study by Bolch and others identified hundreds of newly surging glaciers in the region between 2000 and 2018, most of them in the Karakoram.

These glaciers can block valleys and create lakes, which is what happened when the Shisper Glacier, in Gilgit-Baltistan, began surging in 2017. The advancing ice blocked a river that flowed from an adjacent glacier, creating a new lake. “Once the water pressure is high enough, it lifts the glacier ice and then drains immediately, like a flash flood,” says Bolch. Lakes formed by this glacier burst in 2019 and 2020, and again this May. In July, government officials in Pakistan determined that unusual heat waves had contributed to 16 glacial lake outbursts in the mountains this year, compared with just five or six in previous years.

The Shisper lake outburst in May did not take any lives, due in part to a glacier monitoring system set up under a United Nations Development Program project. Still, the timing of the outburst was not expected, says ICIMOD’s Muhamad. And with the Karakoram Highway and Hassanabad village only a few kilometers away, destruction was almost inevitable. The flood destroyed two homes and damaged 16 others, washed away farms and orchards, and knocked out the local power supply. The collapse of the Hassanabad Bridge cut a key link in the remote northern region, stranding tourists and threatening food supply. Rebuilding a permanent bridge, officials said, could take up to eight months.

***

Despite the advances in knowledge about Himalayan glaciers, scientists say many research gaps remain. The role of black carbon, or soot, in accelerating melt is not fully known. Air pollution from the Indo-Gangetic plains is thought to be depositing black carbon on the mountains, increasing the absorption of heat and accelerating melt. There is also almost no data on permafrost, the ice that lies beneath the ground and can influence water flows and slope stability. “When permafrost thaws, the soil surface loses strength and can subside, destroying roads,” says Azam.

One reason for these gaps is the dearth of field measurements, which would help scientists understand catchment-level changes. Azam notes that there are no weather stations in India above 4,000 meters, above which most glaciers originate. Most new data are from satellite studies. “I can count on one hand the number of glaciologists working in the field,” says Azam, who studies two Himalayan glaciers.

Moreover, the measurements that do exist often don’t get shared, Bolch adds, noting, “This is a political issue.” Governments in the region need to be more collaborative, agrees Khan, in Islamabad. “If countries are isolated and don’t share, we won’t know,” she says. “We’re all part of the same region, and we all get water from the same source. Anything that happens [in one place] is going to have a cascading effect on all of us.”

_____________________

Mumbai-based Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar has worked as a reporter and editor at The Times of India and at The Christian Science Monitor. Her work also has appeared in The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Chandrashekhar was a 2012 Panos South Asia climate change fellow.

Courtesy: Yale Environment 360 (Published on October 3, 2022)

The post As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, a Water Crisis Looms in South Asia first appeared on Sindh Courier.